We are economists writing about economics: Karl Smith, an assistant professor of economics and government at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina; and Adam Ozimek, an associate at an economics consulting firm. As most in our profession are eager to tell you, economics includes just about everything, so we'll be blogging -- with varying degrees of success -- about the economy, markets, politics, science, technology, philosophy and culture. We both come from a similarly vague libertarian ideological perspective, but we've been called neoliberal as well, and idiosyncratic might be the best adjective to use.

What Would a Utopian 15 Hour Work Week Really Look Like?

John Quiggin has a fascinating essay on the prospect of 15 hour work weeks in aeon magazine. One path he sees to this is a guaranteed minimum income for everyone. Essentially he would have us extend the various welfare that you can qualify for today to make it more unconditional, so that everyone has access.

As a far off proposal rather than something to implement tomorrow, I find it interesting to speculate about ideas like this. While I don’t consider it the most probable outcome, I think it is possible that artificial intelligence and greatly improved robotics turns large swathes of society into so-called zero marginal product workers. In this world something like what Quiggen is proposing might well be the best we can do.

To his credit, Quiggin recognizes what I think is one of the biggest possible problems with a guaranteed minimum income: whether it’s caused by artificial intelligence or we just decide to do it, we face the threat of destructive idleness. He argues that one change necessary to make sure guaranteed income is “socially sustainable” is that: “that the option of receiving a guaranteed minimum income does not become a trap, leading into the kind of idleness that produces despair.”

While he has ideas about how to prevent this, I think given more time and freedom most Americans would elect to spend it in ways that the very same liberals who argue for 15 work weeks would find objectionable and wasteful. I think well-intentioned liberals who support a 15 hour work week imagine that people will spend their time enjoying the slow food movement, tending to their organic gardens, and reading to their children. More likely, I think, is that Americans would generally spend more of their extra time sleeping and watching TV. In fact evidence shows that is what Americans do now their marginal free time:

…roughly two-thirds of the increase of leisure time associated with the decline in market work at the business cycle frequency are concentrated in television watching and sleeping. To the extent the individuals consider recessions to be a period of increased leisure, the bulk of the leisure increase shows up as an increase of time in these two categories. Given the large movements in the time allocated to these two categories, our results suggest that economists need to think hard about how individuals value the marginal time spent watching television or sleeping when computing the welfare costs of business cycles. We do not ﬁnd that socializing (spending time with one’s spouse, extended family, and friends) increases signiﬁcantly during recessions.

There isn’t really much of a reason to worry about idleness per se. If you give people money and they choose to be idle then I’d say they are still better off. What I am mostly worried about is what this will do to obesity numbers and then public policy. My fear is that the same liberal vision that wants to give America vast amounts of free time will be the same one that requires widespread and hugely invasive nanny-stateism in order to prevent the guaranteed minimum income from leading to guaranteed maximum obesity.

Now a guaranteed minimum income that came conditional on complying with nanny-stateism that put strict requirements on eating and exercise would be one thing. But today’s liberals tend to want to address the toll that poor health takes on our public finances not by making government spending more paternalistic but by instituting paternalism for all of us. Given how poorly it tends to be designed, the amount of paternalism that would be required to undo the health damage of the 15 hour work week would probably be fairly extreme.

So this is my fear: the 15 hour work week leads to 25 more hours of eating, sleeping, and watching TV and thus a massive increase in obesity. To combat this, we see a huge increase in paternalism for all of us, not just those on the guaranteed minimum income. This is a society where both how we make our living and what we do with it is increasingly defined by the government, and I find this very worrying.

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